Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Parco della Pace: Pizza, sausage and tiled sinks

You may remember my friend Cortney from the dress painting thing... she's the Problem Solver. She's got a spouse named Ted. And Ted likes to try new restaurants. He's the New Restaurant Finder. And he recently found a new restaurant on TripAdvisor. Well, it was new to us, but not new in general. If you like pizza, french fries, chicken wings, sausage and wine, this is your place.

Parco della Pace, which translates to Peace Park in Italian, is, in fact, near Peace Park in Hiroshima. Plan on it taking about an hour to an hour and half to drive there from Iwakuni, depending on traffic. Parking is about 400 yen an hour in the parking structure behind the restaurant. We went on a Saturday evening, and called ahead to make reservations, it was recommend that when you call ahead for reservations, you have someone who speaks Japanese do it for you. Luckily, most of us have access to a Japanese friend or ITT on base. Here is the business card and English menu (yes, there is an English menu! And the staff did speak fairly good English once we were there):

You can see we brought our children. Which was fine. It was fun for the whole family, but it is a small restaurant... we took up about a third of it, so keep that in mind if you're thinking of taking a large group there.

But it is totally worth going. The food was delicious. So was the wine.

The pizza is baked in this stone kiln from Naples...

And I loved that the oven tile matched the tile in the bathroom sink.

The kids were just thrilled to get Coke and ginger ale in bottles. Ah, cheap thrills.

So, the consensus in our group was that Parco della Pace deserved its Tripadvisor 5-star rating. I invite you to check the place out... just make reservations in Japanese first.

So, where did this "tenacious" description come from?

Since college, whenever a male supervisor or colleague disagreed with me, the (printable) description that seemed to be used the most often to describe me was "tenacious." I found it odd that completely unrelated people would come to the same conclusion on multiple occasions over the course of a decade. The word choice was not meant as a compliment and I still have no idea why. In my opinion, tenacity is a delightful thing to have (see the definition above) and I am happy to have it. So, to conclude this correspondence, I sign off with: